Democratic Widgets

You know how the Democrats have always been the party of diversity, the heterogeneous coalition, the party of special interest groups? The party that couldn't get its act together and share resources and information across its various partnerships?

Well evidently the DNC, now controlled by Obama's OFA people, has (at long last) decided to embrace this heterogeneity. Its new voter registration program for 2010, called "Raise Your Vote," comes with an "embeddable widget" that allows state parties, independent Democratic campaigns, progressive groups, and other interested groups to participate in collecting information on folks who register as Democrats. Any “host” site that embeds the registration widget receives valuable, detailed information on individual Democratic voters “downloadable in CSV format,” with all the information stored and processed in a centralized location at the DNC. Everybody wins: Democrats register more voters and progressive groups and Democratic candidates get valuable information about likely supporters of their causes. Here's the story.

This seems rather new and different. Almost seems like the Obama folks want to harness the entire progressive movement to build the Democratic Party, expand its base, etc., while strengthening those groups simultaneously.